Yuri the Hacker

Yuri the Hacker has two posters on his wall, one a poster for Oliver Stone’s forthcoming movie about Edward Snowden and another of Julian Assange. But let’s say Gogol were still alive, what kind of a short story would Yuri merit? What would be Yuri’s “Overcoat?” One thing that Yuri and Gogol’s famous character Akaky Akakievich have in common is that they are both bureaucrats. Yuri is just a cog in the wheel of Russian hacking, monitoring the private e mails of DNC members to see who has or doesn’t have accounts with Ashley Madison ("Hack of Democrats' Accounts Was Wider Than Believed, Officials Say," NYT, 8/10/16)? The more important jobs like describing the moment when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama created ISIS are left to higher ups ("Donald Trump Calls Obama 'Founder of ISIS' and Says It Honors Him," NYT, 8/10/16). Gogol’s character loses his overcoat, but Yuri loses his shirt when he falls for a bum tip on the black market. Yuri has visions of glory in chasing his Holy Grail, which is proof that Hillary Clinton has demanded a pound of flesh when one of the organizations she had given a speech to, couldn’t pony up with the $450,000 fee. Yuri, like Hillary’s adversary in the hotly contested presidential election, doesn't understand metaphor until it's too late and he has already flushed his hard earned rubles down the drain. Russia has many great poets like Pushkin, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky and Pasternak, but under the Putin regime figures of speech have been banned and Yuri doesn't even enjoy the pleasures of hyperbole. After his failed attempt, Yuri starts to go mad, as anyone would who sought to learn about the private lives of politicians whose reputations are already besmirched. Reality starts to blur and he begins to haunt  laundromats to find those American politicians (naturally Democrats) who are willing to air their dirty laundry. Yuri grows ill and becomes delirious and in a final scene finally succumbs. But his confused ghost is reported to haunt the servers, the waiters and waitresses who wait on the apparatchiks in the Kremlin’s executive dining room.

The Suit

We had Gogol’s The Overcoat and now we have Can Themba, Mothobi Mutloatse and Barney’s Simon’s The Suit, directed by Peter Brook, Marie-Helene Estienne and Franck Krawczyk at BAM. The comparisons are hard to ignore. In the classic Gogol short story a civil servant named Akaky Akakievich has his hard won overcoat stolen. In the current production, The Suit is the iconic object and its fate is personification. Philemon (William Nadylam), a South African lawyer in Sophiatown outside of Johannesberg, can neither forget nor forgive after he learns of his wife Matlida’s (Nonhlanhla Kheswa) infidelity and the suit, left behind in haste, becomes a permanent if unwanted member of the household— Matilda's Scarlet Letter. Philemon also recalls Orpheus since he loses his love when he can’t help looking back--in this case at her deed. The Suit is a chamber musical, a piece of folk theater that relates a parable about lovers who become emblematic figures, their individual fates mirroring the condition of blacks in South Africa during Apartheid. Philemon is content with the existence he leads and yet Matilda is not willing to accept and her tragedy is the fate of the dreamer who's unwilling to accept her present world. The oddity of the play and the current production is the equation of sexual and political liberation. Is Matilda’s punishment tantamount to political repression? Adultery may be the expression of the desire for a better life, but it’s unwieldy when it becomes a symbol for the kind of freedom the play alludes to.  

Short Story of the Year (Thus Far)

“The Fountain House” by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (August 31) is the best short story published in the The New Yorker this year. The runner-up is Craig Raine’s “Love Affair with Secondaries” (June 1), and both are coincidentally set in the former Soviet Bloc.

“The Fountain House” is a retelling of Shakeseare’s The Winter’s Tale. A man, heartbroken about the death of his daughter, seeks to bring her back to life, and succeeds. The tone of “The Fountain House” is hopeful, but the hope is so exultant, so extraordinary, so outlandish, that it betrays an underlying despair. Ultimately, the father awakens to the reality of the operating room and the morgue, but in between are marvelous dreams.

In one dream, he brings his daughter her lunch, as he did when she was a young child attending an idyllic summer camp. When he opens the sandwich, he sees an uncooked heart and is afraid his daughter will die if she eats it. He quickly tries to steal it away, but suddenly his daughter’s arms become supernaturally long. He eats the heart himself, thinking he will die, but instead wakes up on a gurney about to give blood.

“The Fountain House” upends the dread of loss and death with the infectious colloquial quality of the great Russian storytellers. The dream sequences recall Akaky Akakievich’s delirium in Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” Indeed, when the father seeks out his daughter, he comes across a harassed morgue attendant, a functionary wonderfully dissociated from death. Everyone has been looking for the same body and he is simply annoyed. He has work to do. What do these people want?

The story falls within the surrealist tradition. It is a parable, without a moral, that negotiates freely between humor, aggression, and death. Looming in the background is the mysterious explosion, the potential final scene of the girl dying in her father’s arms, cut and pasted into the story’s second paragraph. The net effect of “The Fountain House” is Sisyphean, the optimism as delightful as it is hard to grasp.